It is a cardinal principle of our legal and judicial systems that the rights of criminal suspects must not be denied them or abridged save by the say-so of a court of law. All countries enunciate the same principle to keep societies from degenerating into anarchy and jungle justice. The ends of justice would not be served by the resort to instant justice. For one, the law courts would be idle. Spare a thought for the hordes of idle lawyers and you get the point. And for another, human societies being what they are, the roulette table sometimes turns and the cold hands of the law reach out to priests and laymen alike.
But, and it is a big but at that, people tend to have a different take on the rights of criminals – and for good reasons too. Their argument is that since criminals do not respect the rights of their victims, the rights they deny others must be denied them. It should be tit for tat. The armed robber who robs and kills violates the rights of his victim. It makes sense to argue that the man who wilfully denies another of his fundamental human and other rights should not expect the state to grant and protect his own rights to which he is not entitled by reason of his having not respected the rights of his victims.
This, then is the problem with the cardinal principle under reference. Left to their own decisions or judgements, law enforcement agents would be more inclined to breach that principle rather than treat criminals, particularly violent criminals, politely to please the law. Police men and women have the dangerous tough task of apprehending suspects, quite often at the risk of their own lives. Hundreds of policemen and women trying to bring suspects to justice are killed by them every year throughout the world. To make matters worse, some of these criminals, even with their hands dripping with the blood of their victims, sometimes walk out of the law courts as free men. It could be a thoroughly frustrating experience for a police man who went through so much trouble to bring a criminal to justice to see him set free by the court on quite often legal technicalities.
I am afraid that that apparent frustration with the oft strange ways of the law and justice helped to give rise to practices within police departments that breach the law and its cardinal principles. There are extra-judicial killings of criminal suspects by the police. They have periodically been exposed and decried by human rights and other non-government organisations in the country. They also leave rotten eggs on the faces of governments but they are not about to end. The man who carries out an extra-judicial killing believes that the end justifies the means he used to reduce the population of criminals in the society by one.
I draw your attention to what happened in Lagos State on August 19. Four police men responded to a distress call about an armed robbery attack. They had robbed a man of his expensive iPhone Max valued at N450,000. They were four but two escaped. The police recovered two locally-made pistols with six live ammunition from them. The police arrested two of them and shot them dead. The killing was filmed and posted on the social media. The ubiquity of the electronic devices means that fewer and fewer things could be hidden under the sun. The police men were arrested two days later.
They did a good job of arresting the armed robbers but they appeared to have rubbished it by doing what the law does not permit them to do in such circumstances – kill the suspects without allowing them to go through the legal process as required by law. The spokesman for the Lagos Police Command, Bala Elkana, a deputy superintendent of police, said that “that act of extra-judicial killing falls short of the police standards and cannot be condoned by the command.” It would, certainly, not be the last incident. If you look across the ocean you would see that such extra-judicial killings of black people, especially in the United States, are almost normal.
The extra-judicial killings cannot be blamed entirely on bad cops, also known as rotten eggs. Our police men and women are generally decent men and women who want to apply the law as laid down by the law. But my take is that they are under tremendous official pressure to do well by the people – and sometimes allow their emotion to dictate how they apply the law. Under-staffed and poorly equipped as they are, they are prone to frustrations and are bound to take them out on suspected criminals who find themselves in their net. It cannot be that they are not sufficiently made aware by their professional training of their responsibilities to the public. They try to do their best under difficult circumstances; not least because the corruption in the system makes them victims too.
It seems to me that the real fault lies in how our criminals, suspected or convicted, are treated by the system. They are dehumanized and traumatised. And some of them burn with the rage of avenging themselves on the system. You only need to visit the police charge offices to see how badly suspected criminals are treated by the police. Men and women who come out of them are not impressed by the system. Innocent people go to prison and come out at the end of their term as confirmed criminals. They are broken and stigmatised and think of only how they can get back at the system.
Perhaps, a seemingly simple approach would be to begin the process of turning our legal system from being punitive to being reformative. Criminals may be born but the majority of them are made by the system and the society itself. Perhaps the Buhari administration took the first step when the president signed an act changing the Nigerian Prisons Service to Nigerian Correctional Service. This is not a mere change in name. It is a fundamentally new concept in how the state treats criminals. The concept of the prison as a correctional service is different from the concept of the prison as a punitive system.
In the first, the state believes that the average criminal is misguided and needs some help to get back on to the straight road of human decency after he has served his punishment. His punishment is not to destroy him but to reform him. The criminal is thus helped to reform himself and return to the society a changed man or woman.
The second system is purely punitive and is intended to deter the criminal from returning to his old ways. Both systems have their measure of failures but the latter is more prone to failure than the former. The new act imposes huge responsibilities on the state. There are two components to it, namely, custodial and non-custodial services. It is not possible for me to go to greater details here. But let me say that if we change the name without effecting fundamental changes in the system, we might end up confused because we would be grafting a new system on to the old system. To make the new act effective, our policemen and women need radical re-orientation to make them appreciate the nuances of punishment as reformatory and punishment as destructive of human sense of worth and dignity.
